143 million gallons of sewage spill into Tijuana River

About 143 million gallons of sewage spilled into the Tijuana River during a period of more than two weeks, said a report released Friday.

No other sewage spill in the greater San Diego-Tijuana region has approached this magnitude in years, according to the environmental group Wildcoast.

The latest spill started around Feb. 2 and was not contained until Thursday, the U.S. section of the International Boundary and Water Commission said in its report.

It apparently was caused by a rupture in a sewage collector pipe near the junction of Mexico’s Alamar and Tijuana rivers, the second of which drains into the Pacific Ocean on the U.S. side of the border.

The author of the report, Steven Smullen, operations manager for the commission, could not be reached Friday evening.

Imperial Beach Mayor Serge Dedina, who shared the report with the Union-Tribune after receiving a copy of it, criticized federal officials on both sides of the border for not alerting people to the spill.

“It’s a major communication failure,” Dedina said. “It’s obviously something they knew for a very long time,” he said.

The mayor said he suspected something was wrong when Imperial Beach residents began to notice a foul smell earlier this month.

“It became pretty bad,” Dedina said.

Alejandro Tamayo / Union-Tribune

The Tijuana River is often polluted with old tires, plastic bags, discarded food and other debris.

The Tijuana River is often polluted with old tires, plastic bags, discarded food and other debris. (Alejandro Tamayo / Union-Tribune)

So he wrote to the commission to inquire about a possible spill. The mayor said his office will seek an investigation into the spill and its aftermath.

South Bay beaches, which typically would be closed by such a spill, already were off-limits to water contact because of sewage runoff as a result of recent storms, Dedina said.

Despite hundreds of millions of dollars spent by both governments to capture wastewater and other debris flowing in the Tijuana River, contaminated runoff from Tijuana regularly spills into San Diego County after storms.

Over the years, several large sewage spills on both sides of the border have worsened conditions in the Tijuana River, one of the most polluted waterways in the country. Old sewage infrastructure, or the lack of any plumbing in some residences, in Tijuana has repeatedly been blamed for the problem.